


Fractal Dreaming

by TopHat



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Africa, Gen, She's Alone In This One, Warlord!AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:01:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23235880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TopHat/pseuds/TopHat
Summary: Warlord!Kenzie in Bet's Africa, where she's just as terrifying as you'd expect.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	Fractal Dreaming

There were days that Kenzie didn’t want to get out of bed. More than a few. A lot. Most. Maybe all of them. It was easy to remain snuggled up in covers, to ignore the light coating of sweat that covered her skin and how it stuck to the blankets, the stale smell of person, and just pretend like the rest of the world didn’t exist. She’d have to eat eventually, or go to the bathroom, but the bed would still be there. Kenzie knew she could just drift away in the doze of near-sleep for the rest of her life, and if she could take the discomfort that wouldn’t even be so long. Rule of three, right? Three weeks without food, three days without water, three minutes without air...  
  
But she had a job to do.  
  
Kenzie pushed off the covers and stood up, shivering slightly in the fan-cooled air. After tossing her hair over her shoulders and rubbing some warmth back into her arms Kenize walked towards her Get Ready Room, the grated metal beneath her ringing slightly as her bare feet trod across it. An updraft from the cooling fans a hundred feet below made her night gown billow out, dwarfing her, a phenomenon cut off when she stepped onto the ceramic floor and pulled the frosted glass door shut and silenced the soothing hum of the fans. For a second she enjoyed the quiet, savoring the silence.  
  
Then she turned around and began to prepare for the day  
  
Strip, shower, brush teeth, drink water, don bodysuit and mask. Once the essentials were taken care of, Kenzie stepped out of the hygiene area and went over to the wardrobe. The white bodysuit was a concession to her vestigial modesty while the helmet made keeping track of things easier, but the clothes were for staying sane. There was something inherently soothing about picking an outfit for the day, about thinking about how colors interacted with one another, what patterns would clash and which ones would not. A little puzzle, one disconnected from work, with which to start her day. She’d never picked up a caffeine habit, but she figured the feeling of contentment was probably similar. Today she decided on a lighter theme. A pastel yellow sundress, with a blue bolero over the shoulders. Outside it was going to be a clear day, warm, and she want to take full advantage of that.  
  
When Vision stepped out of the changing rooms the fans had shut down, making her footsteps towards the elevators echo even more loudly. On the way up she adjusted the display on the outside of her tower, throwing together a semi-random pattern of gradual blue and yellow watercolor patterns that would slowly shift as the day went by. Art was important for civic pride, and she had the power to spare.  
  
She stepped off three quarters of the way up the tower, high enough that the people below were indistinguishable from one another, onto the observation deck. Floor to ceiling windows on every side, with a lone swivel chair to accompany the four support pillars as the only distinguishing features of the room. After a moment of silence, she walked over to the swivel chair, turned around, and sat down.  
  
“Show me Tripoli,” she whispered.  
  
The metropolis came to life around her. A scaled model, rendered with a sharpness well past what she could see, dyed a bizarre conglomeration of colors. Those colors were a code, one only she truly understood, built on an algorithm that she’d cribbed from data collected on the previous king’s personal Thinktank. After ensuring that there was no black or red in her city, Vision began trawling through the darkest oranges she could find.  
  
It was surprisingly easy, watching the city. Vision wasn’t sure if this was because she’d taken it from someone else who’d already worked their way through all the revolutionaries, because she’d raised the standards of living and gotten rid of the enforcers that made her stomach turn, or just because the people genuinely liked her. The compliments to insult ratio supported the last point, but people were smart enough to understand that talking in a city run by a tinker who specialized in seeing things may not have been a good idea. Things were a little less skewed in the written word but that was to be expected, what with the whole ‘oh man I can’t see ink on page’ lie she’d been spreading around these past few weeks. The counterinsurgency teams had already traced out a few budding terrorist groups, and while the cape-watchers were pretty sure at least two strangers were still running around the city they didn’t seem to be causing problems. Overall, things were looking up.  
  
Vision spun the map and zoomed in on a blob of orange. Two boys ganging up on a third, verbal confrontation only. A few eye blinks and a hand wave had an A-class drone drifting down to them. Calling it a drone was even a bit much, it was just a camera that could fly and project simple pre recorded messages. Ninety-nine percent of the time, that’s all she needed to do. A warning, a little ‘please go to an authority figure and sort this out’, and the problem was solved. The boys backed away from the little one before they broke out into a sprint, fleeing the scene of the incident as the drone provided the little boy with directions to the nearest caretaker. Dossiers were already popping up, information scrolling next to their photos, dismissed casually. Too much crime, too little time to spend precious seconds reading about who she helped. This time it’s a couple, voices below intervention levels but still recognizably tense. This time she stationed a drone in the vicinity, ready but not yet projecting a red wall between them. Domestic disputes was always weird, and even if she could create accurate models of how people people’d, it’d be... bad, applying them. This one would probably blow over without too much of a fuss, just like the other nine simmering in the apartment building. If it escalated to hitting a drone would step in, and the police wouldn’t be far behind. She zoomed out again, scanning Tripoli for her next intervention.  
  
Tripoli. One of the largest cities in Africa, four million people in one hundred and seventy two square miles of tinkertech-infused landscape, most of it not her own. Nearly five hundred capes, maybe a fifth of which were nominally on her side. One of the jewels of the continent, neighbored by Amen-Ta’s slowly growing kingdom to the east and Casablanca’s cranky ports to the west, filled to the bursting with people too smart to buy the new Pharaoh's gospel and too prudish to live on the same street as a brothel.  
  
As she flicked through incidents, Vision did her best to avoid looking at the steadily increasing pile of unresolved problems. Turns out that even if you multitasked really, _really_ well, worked yourself to the bone for days on end, and ignored a whole lot of human rights legislation, you could never really investigate every crime. She’d tried that once, a month of staying awake on tinkermeth and push past her admittedly squishy morals. It had been hell, cost her millions, and caused more than a lot of her capes to scamper off to greener pastures. The result? A coup attempt, dozens of dead capes, and a leveled skyscraper. She hadn’t lost power, not quite, but it had been too close to try again.  
  
The fact that the drop to crime rates didn’t stick was just a little more salt in the wound.  
  
Once that mess had been sorted out, she’d cut back. Sleeping pills kept her going to bed, strict schedules ensured she didn’t fall off the deep end on patrol or in the lab, and The Rules made sure that no one took advantage of her. It didn’t feel good, heading off to her cot when she knew that there were people still hurting below her. There was always the urge to turn around, to work for just a few more minutes, just one more shoplifter traced, just one more drone recalibrated.  
  
It would never be just a few minutes, though. Five turned into ten turned into thirty turned into an hour, one shoplifter turned into investigating a few bullies turned into trying to crack a drug ring, one drone turned into a new design turned into a few adjustments to every box on level seventeen turned into being discovered by Everyman waist-deep in a Mark VII Medusa as she tried to teach it how to shot through powers. Vision knew where here limits were, and she also knew the difference between could and should. She could burn herself out, become one of many failed warlords, and do nothing in the long run. She should swallow her discomfort, settle into the role as a watcher, and wait for the effects of a stable rule to make themselves apparent. Waiting sucked but it worked, so Vision would wait.  
  
She flicked over to a lost child, got a drone to start escorting her to school, and kept moving on, wading on through a world of impersonal color.  
  


* * *

  
  
When Vision was finally done for the day, little had changed. The city still glowed with hotspots of stress, still had intermittent issues taken care of by both parahuman and governmental officials, and was still preparing for the next siege. Hardly a month went by without some group of hotshots trying to make a name for themselves by challenging her for the throne. They never win, but the degree of victory mattered when you were running a city. If you could pull off perfect, pull off overwhelming, and do it consistently, all but the craziest people would stop trying. If you couldn’t make it look convincing, make it look like there was no contest, then the sharks started smelling blood in the water. On the other hand, Vision was _really good_ at controlling how things looked.  
  
After changing out of her costume, she has her meal for the day. Tinker sludge, nutritious and filling and with the consistency of cold oatmeal. Kezie forced it down. Jackboot was one of the few truly loyal capes she had, and while her supplements never tasted good they were also never poisoned. That, and the whole ‘perfect blend of omninutrients that conformed to what your body needed’ let her shave an hour of sleep away, an hour she could use to unwind. Once the final check ups were done, Kenzie went back to her bed. She changed back into her nightgown, pulled on an imaging glove, and conjured up her dossier of Special People.  
  
They weren’t capes. Capes she either recruited, politely asked to leave, or marked for removal by the Maaiers. No, these were just people, much like the rest of her population, but... different. Not in a bad way, not dissidents, but off-beat. A few of them had dropped out of school, started selling art, selling clothes, babysitting. A little bit illegal, but since they were good at it Kenzie didn’t call down a drone. Another few were still in the system but did things _weird_ , like the boy who completed his essays in crayon, or the girl who always turned in perfect assignments at the last minute, or the couple who kept having sex in public without getting caught by anyone other than her. Odd balls, ones who were wrong, but not wrong in a way that meant she had to intervene. Which maybe made them not wrong, period.  
  
It was this hour, at the end of the day, where she allowed herself to doubt a little. Not a lot, not enough to do anything crazy, but maybe she adjusted her algorithms to allow for people who worked in the sewer system to get a little more soap. Maybe she prompted her legislators to look into the viability of after-school daycare exemptions. Maybe she started thinking about trying to put together a mass-producible device that let people engage in exhibitionist fantasies without risking the mortification of themselves or others.  
  
Maybe she buried her head in a pillow until her face stopped burning after that last one, but since no one saw it didn’t matter.  
  
Eventually the hour was over, though. Reluctantly, Kenzie stripped off the glove, the images dying away around her. She shook two sleeping tablets out, dry-swallowed, and slipped under her blankets, waiting for the capsules to dissolve and send her off to dreamland.  
  
Once, she’d had a big bed. Once she’d slept in a palace, fancy and decorated in gold, with a bunch of other people she could call up and talk to at any time of the day or night. Once she’d tried to be loved as well as respected, tried to balance being a warlord and being a big sister to as many people as possible.  
  
Kenzie pulled the cloth closer, reaching up one arm for long enough to pull a pillow over her head, drowning out what little light there was.  
  
It was better this way.


End file.
